Did Fox shoot eight minutes of test footage for “Deadpool?”

The Deadpool movie is a project that just refuses to die, and despite the fact that we haven’t heard anything new in months, it seems that Fox is still actively developing the film. Rob Liefeld, who created the character, made an appearance last weekend at the Amazing Arizona Comic Con, and spilled a few new details regarding the film’s status. Bleeding Cool has an embed of the entire panel, and the good stuff starts around the 37:00 minute mark.

If you don’t feel like sitting through the entire story, here’s the most important quote:

“They’ve got a great director on the movie, they’ve got a great script. I may or may have not seen some sort of test of footage that would blow your mind if you saw it and go holy crap and that’s Deadpool in costume. Katana swords, guns, shooting people’s faces off and making me laugh. And I may or may not have seen something that looks just like that. And you’ve got what would amount to the first R Rated X-Men movie. Because that script is R Rated.

They may or may not have wanted to shoot eight minutes to see how it would play. And all I can tell you, it’s close. It’s closer that it’s even been to going, or going Naaah, that’s too scary a proposition to make a R Rated Deadpool movie.”

I think most comic book fans are united in the belief that there’s absolutely no reason to do a Deadpool movie unless it’s as over-the-top and ridiculous as the source material. We’ve already seen what happens when the studios try to alter the character for a PG-13 audience, and the results were atrocious. With Ryan Reynolds still attached, hopefully Fox gets enough positive response to the test footage that they decide to greenlight the project without screwing it up.